Match the Sentence to the Picture

Six gapped sentences stand on the left of this 1st grade page and six pictures on the right, each with a coral dot on its inner edge. Nothing is written and no word bank is offered. The sentences on the sheet shown are has black and white stripes, pecks holes in the tree, hops and nibbles a carrot, carries its baby in a pouch, has a very long neck, and rolls in the mud and says oink; the pictures are a pig, a giraffe, a kangaroo, a woodpecker, a rabbit and a zebra.

This is the only face of the cloze family with no writing on it at all, which makes it the one to reach for when reading and handwriting need separating. The pictures are deranged — no sentence sits opposite its own animal — so every line crosses the page and a child who works by position gets nothing right. The clue in each sentence is a single distinguishing fact, so the page rewards reading to the end rather than guessing from the first word.

One sheet, six sentences, six lines. It is the quickest page in the family and a fair check of whether a child is reading the sentence or the picture, since here the picture is the answer rather than the support. Give it before the letter-box face if spelling is getting in the way of comprehension.